Ally, Sports Innovation Lab Launch Women’s Sports Dealmaking Club
A new invite-only club is coming to women’s sports, and it hopes to pack a bigger punch than its predecessors. Sports Innovation Lab and Ally Financial (NYSE: ALLY) say their new Women’s Sports Club will work to actively broker deals that increase investment in sponsorship, advertisement and media coverage of women’s sports.
The WNBA, LPGA, NWSL and Athletes Unlimited are among the leagues with representation in the club, alongside brands including Nike, Gatorade, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Octagon, Morgan Stanley, Puma, Adobe, Michelob Ultra, Meta, Athleta, Billie Jean King Enterprises, espnW, fuboTV and Just Women’s Sports. The founders insist this is not another networking group.
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The goal is clear: to tangibly move the needle on women’s sports spend.
“At the end of this, we want more dollars to be exchanged, we want more business to happen,” said Angela Ruggiero, CEO and co-founder of the Sports Innovation Lab, the market intelligence company behind the women’s sports research initiative The Fan Project. “For me, a good outcome is that deals get done by the end of the year. We see one more dollar spent on sponsorship; we see another dollar spent on ad buying. We see media properties [realize] there’s market demand out there, not just from the fans and the audience, but from the brands that fuel the whole ecosystem.”
Ruggiero said she hopes to expand to the club, which will meet several times throughout the year, starting this week in Austin at the SXSW Sports Track presented by Sportico, as word spreads. No membership fee is required, but participants are expected to share insights and actively participate in solution-oriented discussions.
There is a chicken-or-egg problem that has long crippled the growth of women’s sports. Brands say the current media coverage doesn’t justify advertising dollars, while broadcasters say there aren’t enough advertising dollars behind women’s sports to justify media coverage. Women’s sports leagues are therefore left fighting for viewership—or relying on numbers that reflect games played outside of optimal broadcast slots and very often on a partner’s secondary channels or fledgling streaming services—which create an uphill climb toward substantive media rights deals.
All of this, the Sports Innovation Lab and Ally emphasize, hinders the growth of women’s sports leagues and trickles down in lower pay for players.
But when given the opportunity to showcase their potential, women’s sports properties have done so. Last year’s NWSL’s championship game, for example, saw a viewership increase of 71% on CBS after it was put in primetime for the first time in the league’s history. But the coveted Saturday night broadcast slot was only secured after Ally, a financial services provider which pledged in 2022 to reach parity in its men’s and women’s sports media spends over the next five years, made a financial commitment to the broadcast network.
Data from Sports Innovation Lab, whose clients include the NFL, NHL, FIFA, Google, Facebook, Coca-Cola, Visa and Puma, shows that the number of women’s sports fans is growing twice as fast as general sports fans and that fans of women’s sports are more supportive of brands that sponsor or advertise with their favorite leagues, teams and athletes. Despite the growing body of evidence behind the business case for partnering with women’s sports, their slice of the brand, investment,and media pies remain disproportionately low.
The Women’s Sports Club’s founders say change starts with information but also requires getting the right people together to make deals happen, as reflected in the early invitee list.
“One, we went after the biggest spenders in traditional sports,” Gina Waldhorn, Sports Innovation Lab CMO, said. “If you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on traditional and men’s sports, you’ve got room to do a little bit better in being more equitable with that investment and spending more in women’s sports. Then we went after those who have already shown a commitment to women’s sports, because not only do we think they can continue to do more, but they’re going to be guides for some of these other brands. We wanted to make sure that we had the buy side in the room, and then we went to the inventory holders and brought the sell side in.”
Ruggiero, a four-time Olympic hockey medalist, and Andrea Brimmer, Ally’s chief marketing officer, will address the club’s mission and goals on a Sportico panel on March 12 at SXSW alongside ESPN’s EVP of marketing Laura Gentile and Google’s director of global sports and entertainment marketing, Kate Johnson.
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